Sniffing Airlocks since 2010

Join our brewing community! The idea is to share brewing info, recipes, and general nonsense...always with a little humor mixed in!

If you like the sound of this and want to join us, simply click the Forum (Beta) link and register an account. I have forums set up for a few different categories and limited it to around five to keep things simple. Please create a topic and help us grow this into something great!

p.s. there is a good chance that nothing new will be posted on BrewGeeks.com for a few weeks because I'd like to give people a chance to find the forum and register.

Since this is a beta, if you encounter any problems with the forum, please send an email to emailbrewgeeks@gmail.com so I can get it sorted out.

BeerSmith Lite is now available for iPad, iPhone on the Apple App Store. We are very excited about this at BrewGeeks because BeerSmith is such a big part of our brewing experience.

My initial impression is that it's very well laid out and love the access to cloud recipes along with a nice set of tools and calculators for brewday. For now it appears not to be optimized for the new iPhone 5 display but hopefully that will come in a future update.

There's also a nice timer feature that counts down through the brewing steps and I'll post more about this feature after my next brew session.

Look for our complete review of this app after the full version is released in a few months; we are very excited for the inclusion of editing capability!

Features as listed from BeerSmith.com

Find New Recipes – Search our online database of over 3,000 beer recipes directly from your phone or tablet. If you find one you like you can save it locally to your phone or to your cloud account for easy desktop integration.

View your Desktop Recipes On The Go – You can easily view your recipes on the go using the BeerSmith cloud folder and BeerSmithRecipes.com. Copy a recipe to your cloud folder on BeerSmith desktop and you can open it from your phone or tablet. (Note: BeeerSmith Lite does not include recipe editing).

Time Your Brew Day – A full brewday timer for your phone or tablet provides both steep/mash and boil timers with step-by-step brewday instructions. In addition, all of the critical estimated data (IBUs, OG, Volumes, fermentation, aging) is displayed on the timer page for easy reference while brewing.

It's funny how something right under our nose can go unnoticed for so long. This was the case with a local shop near me that makes masterfully crafted tap handles.

The family owned business called Mark Supik & Co. is located in Baltimore, Maryland and has been making custom woodturned items since 1981. Their gallery of tap handles is impressive and represents pulls created for many of the regions best microbreweries. At $19 each (more for custom), they also seem reasonably priced. If you're interested, they have a mailing list for homebrewers to receive info once it's available.

One of the best ways for a brewer to save money is to reuse yeast. Liquid yeast in particular, while offering a large variety of strains, can cost anywhere from $6.50 to $8 per vial. This can amount to 15-25% of the total cost of one 5 gallon batch!

Before we outline our process (in the link below), here are a few storage and temperature guidelines as recommended by White Labs.

How long can yeast be stored? The best case scenario is to use the yeast within 1-3 days. Again, this is often not possible, especially if multiple strains are being used in the brewery. The magic number seems to be two weeks. If less than two weeks, brewers will usually have no problem reusing yeast. Over two weeks and you may or may not have problems. After four weeks, the viability of yeast slurry is usually 50% or lower.

As yeast sit in storage, they consume their glycogen reserves. Glycogen deprivation weakens their cell walls, and makes them more susceptible to rupture. Cold temperatures retard this process, but you want to avoid freezing yeast, as ice crystals will also rupture cells. The ideal storage temperatures range is between 33-38F. When yeast rupture, they release their contents into the liquid phase. Bacteria can feed off the nitrogen released, and multiply rapidly. So the yeast slurry needs to be as contamination free as possible when stored. Cold temperatures will also help retard bacterial growth.

As I prepare to watch football today (can you believe it's week 6 already?), I looked at some of the articles that I pulled over the past week. One jumps out in particular and it's a video that I had not seen before.

Grant Wood, the Senior Brew Master at Boston's Sam Adams brewery, takes us on a tour of their brewhouse and shares details on the science of brewing along the way.

If you haven't seen it, the video is great for the new brewer and if nothing else, makes us look very smart to our spouse or significant other who normally just rolls her eyes.

Can't wait to get my hands on the new BeerSmith mobile app that was just released! Brad says that you can’t create or edit recipes using the “lite” app, but you can find new recipes from BeerSmithRecipes.com, download your own recipes from the cloud service, run a brewday timer, and use the reference and brewing calculators from within the app.

The android version is available from google play now and the iphone app is awaiting approval!

Cleaning carboys can be a pain, especially if you let them sit around for a while. Whether you ferment in glass or plastic, it's usually a good idea to let the carboy soak for a while to soften up the band of hardened yeast that typically forms at the top.

After soaking, most brewers I know toss in a wet papertowl (or shop cloth), plug the opening, and swirl the towel around to remove the last of the gunk. This works well for wide-mouth bottles but not so much for narrower glass bottles.

Here's a great inexpensive DIY project created by Casey Weed that cleans even the narrowest of bottles!

Casey describes some of the project below and be sure to hit the link (or the picture above) for the full instructions.

"I recently put together a handheld carboy/keg pressure washer and hadn’t see anything like it so I thought I would share. I always have trouble getting the dried up krausen on the top of the carboy off with my brush and always felt like it would come right off if I could get a little pressure on it. This is what I came up with.

Racking cane

6’ 3/8” vinyl tubing

3/4” Slip to 3/4 FHT (PVC) adapter

1/2" FPT X 3/4" Slip (PVC)

1/2” MPT x 3/8 barbed (vinyl)

Two small stainless hope clamps (I think 5/16”, I already had these)

Screw thread protector (sorry, I don’t recall the exact size. Get the tightest you can) Drill a hole in the tip, I used a 1/8” bit."

As you may have noticed from many of our chart of the week posts, we like infographics here at BrewGeeks. For this week, we are not posting chart, but a link to buy a full-sized poster of one. The folks over at Pop Chart Lab have done quite a bit of research to compile a United States map of every brewery.

Perfect for your house pub and the most comprehensive mapping of the breweries of the USA ever compiled, this monster print measures in at over seven square feet and over 1,000 breweries from craft to macro and everything in between.

If you don't know about Pop Chart Lab, they have a number of other nice posters available as well. Check them all out here.